Human Croquet

Description

The brilliant and profound second novel from the three-times Costa prizewinner and number one bestseller Kate Atkinson. The brilliant and profound second novel from the three-times Costa prizewinner and number one bestseller Kate Atkinson. 'Vivid, richly imaginative, hilarious and frightening by turns' Observer Once it had been the great forest of Lythe. And here, in the beginning, lived the Fairfaxes, grandly, at Fairfax Manor. But over the centuries the forest had been destroyed, replaced by Streets of Trees. The Fairfaxes have dwindled too; now they live in 'Arden' at the end of Hawthorne Close and are hardly a family at all. But Isobel Fairfax, who drops into pockets of time and out again, knows about the past. She is sixteen and waiting for the return of her mother - the thin, dangerous Eliza with her scent of nicotine, Arp ge and sex, whose disappearance is part of the mystery that still remains at the heart of the forest.

Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her four bestselling novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie became the BBC television series Case Histories, starring Jason Isaacs. Her 2013 novel Life After Life won the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Prize, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize, voted Book of the Year for the independent booksellers associations on both sides of the Atlantic. It also won the Costa Novel Award, as did her new novel A God in Ruins (2015). She was appointed MBE in the 2011 Queen's Birthday Honours List, and was voted Waterstones UK Author of the Year at the 2013 Specsavers National Book Awards.

Vivid, richly imaginative, hilarious and frightening by turns * Observer * Huge, exhilarating, loving and detailed eruption of a novel...an utterly intoxicating display of novelistic elan...big and joyous, literary and accessible...storytelling at its buoyant best * The Scotsman * Wonderfully eloquent and forceful Kate Atkinson goes at the same pace in her second novel as she did in her first...welcome back, wild north-easter...brilliant and engrossing * Evening Standard * Vivid and intriguing...fizzles and crackles along...a tour de force * Independent * Part ghost story, part murder mystery, this is an exquisitely written, literary novel that reads as compellingly as any thriller * Cosmopolitan * A stunner of a second novel...a gutsy book, wrenched from the heart and written with tremendous force, immersing you in its strange, eccentric world * Marie Claire * The quirky imagination, subversive humour and instinct for domestic chaos that Atkinson displayed in her first novel...are rampantly evident again * Publishers Weekly *